Tableau Software has made it clear over the past year that it is one of the rising stars of the local software community. Spun out from Stanford University in 2003, the company has spent the last seven years carving out a global market of businesspeople and consumers itching for a new product to help them sift through mounds of data efficiently, and even having a little fun.

The company has sought its answer through taking something that causes most people a headache—staring at an unorganized document full of data and attempting to make sense of it—and transforming that muddle into graphics and visualizations that are easy to create, and manipulate, to get the most out of the information as possible.